


He Had Always Been a God

by I_Am_The_Circle



Category: A Separate Peace - John Knowles
Genre: Character Study, Grief/Mourning, Loss, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-05 21:04:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6723367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_Am_The_Circle/pseuds/I_Am_The_Circle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gene goes to the funeral and contemplates the nature of Phineas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Had Always Been a God

**Author's Note:**

> I just really wanted to explain why we never learn Finny's last name.

At the funeral, I don't look at the headstone. I don't want to see his full name, am unwilling to see him so formalized, so memorialized like the plaques below the paintings in the dark courtroom. I don't think about his last name. It makes him seem so much more realistic, human, just like any other kid, when he was always more. Having a last name to connect him to parents and a family didn't fit him; he had always been a god, a force of nature, pure energy with no beginning and no end. But of course that isn't true; here we are at the end. That's how they all act, like he's gone and over and done, but I have a hard time believing that when I can still feel him, his energy, unending. I hear his voice sometimes, imagine his crooked smile. I still cannot speak of him, cannot bear to hear him spoken of like a memory, a faded photograph already drifting out of mind. For me, he's never drifted out of mind. Even when I hated him, I always thought of him, and I thought of him every other time too, when I liked him and when I loved him, and now, when I remember him. He's all I've ever thought of, since I first met him and became complicit in all his schemes and Societies, his plots and conspiracies. Phineas was all-encompassing. He defined my life by relation, changed everything with his very existence. His easy smile; his eyes like the glint off the ocean when it's sunny; his smooth, effortless gait, as if gliding on air. And his voice. A voice like music, even though he couldn't sing for his life, a voice like you could listen to it forever and it would never lose its charm, its hypnotism. And the words behind the voice only added to the sense of enchantment. Anything he said was true, at least for him, in that moment it was said. It had to be true, because he had said it, and you believed anything he had to say, because he was just so alive.


End file.
